Tuesday, May 5, 2015

EASTER VI 2015

The
theme of love is especially prominent in the Epistle and
Gospel for this week, both from John. It is a theme to which
contemporary
Christians warm very readily since it is relatively ‘theology-lite’, so
to speak. If 'God is love', can we not just speak of 'Love' to those who
are puzzled or alienated by references to 'God'? Many Christians take this line, but it is very easy for talk of love to amount to little more
than the rather thin doctrine that 'we ought to care about other people'.
Concern for others is
admirable, certainly, but it hardly requires the story of God's
Incarnation, Crucifixion and
Resurrection to make a case for it. Human decency is enough, surely.

A deeper question, however, is whether love is the animating spirit that informs the world in which we
live. Modern materialism makes physical forces and biological processes the
ultimate explanatory factors, and leaves us to conceive of happiness as
enjoyinglife to the best of our
abilities and helping others to do so. Did Jesus have an enjoyable life? The
question seems all wrong somehow. He tells his followers to "abide in
love", but this love of life, he says, can find its fullest expression in
"laying down one's life for one's friends" -- not ultimate satisfaction, that is to say, but ultimate sacrifice.

Conversation with God - Nicholas Roerich

How could that make sense? If the world into which we are
born is indifferent (or even hostile) to our deepest attachments and
aspirations -- love, justice, beauty, truth -- we must wrest from it what we
can while we can, and do so under the constant shadow of our own mortality. But
if those things on which our hearts are most deeply fixed lie at the foundation
of reality, if they are the things that called us into existence in the first
place, then there is a profound harmony between the human spirit and the
creative spirit that underlies the world.

'God is love' means love is ultimate, not because we can make it our Ultimate
Concern, but because the Eternal Word has made it the spirit that infuses all
things. We do not choose God; God has already chosen us.